Second Week of #the100dayproject

Stuck indoors, but wanting to paint landscapes. . . .

The second week of #the100dayproject mixed frustration with a sense of accomplishment. Yes, I was filling sketchbook pages, but I wasn’t making things that were really satisfying, or pointing towards a new direction. There was a definite sense of marking time. I switched over to watercolor, using large brushes, and painting directly onto the page with little or no preparatory linework. The Fabriano Tiziano paper in my sketchbook continued to be a frustration, being very lightweight and not sized properly for wet media. By Thursday, I’d switched back to one of my half-used Fabriano Venezia sketchbooks. The Accademia paper is a heavier hotpress (~90 lb) with enough sizing for watercolor.

This way of working in loose washes was so much the same as the way I have always sketched, especially when traveling. It’s fun, but it has little relation to what I’m doing now. I don’t really see how getting even better at this approach for 100 days is going to get me closer to pushing through the difficulties I’m encountering in my current normal approach. I really needed to regroup.

Below are last week’s sketchbook pages.

I completed each of these sketches in single short sessions, using large brushes and little or no underdrawing.

Most recently in the studio, I was super enthused this January & February about drawing a very small colored-pencil drawing of a tiger’s eye with a very tightly cropped section of its face (based on a catalog cover from Nat Geo. Junk mail *can* be inspiring!) Similarly, I was very enthused last November while taking Dina Brodsky’s bird drawing workshop, using master copies and my husband’s photos for reference. It wasn’t just working with animals, which are naturally more emotionally appealing. It had to do also with the small scale combined with the attention to detail and intensity of craft, I think.

It would be fun to continue pursuing that, rather than completion of an image in every sitting, thus sacrificing the chance to make a complete statement, perhaps.

I’m also still intrigued about working on some landscape drawings, though. Unfortunately, the junipers have had a boom pollination season this year, and I’ve been stuck indoors with fierce allergies, even as the weather has warmed up enough to allow short outdoor sketch sessions at midday.

Because working observationally is still a core of the 100-day project for me, I’ll need to wait to do anything plein-air until the end of this month. In the meantime, I started a little sketch of some shiitake mushrooms from last Thursday’s CSA bag.

Study of shiitake mushrooms, in progress.

I’d like to give a big shout out to my coworking pal Elisabeth Markus. She’s been sharing her children’s storybook project, as well as her analog wet and dry media experiments here on Substack for this year’s #the100dayproject. It’s really inspiring to learn how she has structured the project to allow for both very defined project goals AND the option to be playful and open to improvising. Go check her work out—her book characters have so much charm and express the storyline so well!